Another Superbowl Sunday and I missed it again. It hasn't even started, but I can safely predict that by end of day watching the Superbowl will only have entered my mind as something not to do.

The lone American male not watching football on TV, not even to see the first-run commercials, the ones that cost the advertisers millions per half minute. Let's see, what does that make me? Definitely a minority. And just as definitely suspect as a bona-fide American male, not quite a real man.

I never wanted to be a jock. In the 10th grade I went out for football because my daddy was too short to play when he was in high school, so it was my role to do it for him. I didn't see that at the time, however. I thought it would please daddy, though I already knew better.

One of those things we know and then go against because we don't want to believe it, then find out the hard way, again, that nothing works.

Three weeks into football practice after school, bashing and getting bashed, we moved 200 miles away. The stranger at the school where everything was new and weird, I let football go and never missed it.

I spent my high school years waiting for time to pass until I'd be self-sufficient enough to get myself out of there. Wichita is an island in Flatland. You can drive for hours in any direction and see nothing but flat land, oil wells, sky and highway. I never liked Wichita and certainly never identified with the place.

Looking back from here I see the period of my life there is characterized by unconsciousness and confusion. Every Christmas vacation I came down with flu the first day school was out and recovered the day before school started. That tells me something, though I'm not sure what. I hadn't been permitted many decisions for myself, being told what to do from all directions, all of them, I see now, other peoples' agendas, never mine. As I grow and educate myself away from that confusion I find my life gets better as it goes along. Ignorance is not bliss.

In those years I felt desperately lonesome. Where we lived in Kansas City had a huge acreage of woods from the edge of the backyard to Monkey Mountain. The woods became my comfort through childhood. I liked to roam around in them and find new places. It was my own world. I didn't know until after I lost them that I had come to need those woods as much as my mother needed church for comfort from the storm.

I'd be told I could play for 15 minutes and would come back to the house an hour or so later. Of course, I'd get in trouble and of course didn't care because my time playing in the woods was my real and most valuable time where what seemed like 15 minutes turned out to be an hour. I was always in trouble so getting in trouble was meaningless.

My grandmother Worthington, Tina Marie, Aunt Teen to nieces and nephews, lived in a one-room apartment over the garage behind the house at the edge of the woods. She taught me how to keep chickens, canaries, goldfish, guppies and turtles. She was good with birds and fish.

She always kept a male canary singer in a cage by a window. She loved canary song. I did, too. We would listen to Grand Ole Opry to hear her favorite singer, Little Jimmy Dickens. "He's little but he's loud," she'd say, "like a banty rooster."

We sat at a table with puzzles for hours on end. She was a countrywoman from Perry, Kansas, a place not much different from Sparta, though flat, where she grew up on a farm and went to First Baptist.

In my first year in the mountains there was something I couldn't put my finger on that was familiar. It was like the figures of speech, and the ways of talking I already knew. Then it came to me one day riding in the car with Van Pruitt, maybe a mile from the house on Air Bellows Gap Road, that mountain language was the same as Kansas prairie language in the time of outhouses and horses.

The movement of early settlers from east to west across the continent from generation to generation carried with it figures of speech and ways of talking and thinking about things.

I came to the mountains with no experience in mountain life and felt the closest to home I've ever felt anywhere.

I realized in the first year that the language, the customs and the way people thought was familiar because my grandmother talked and thought like that, allowing that she didn't have a southern accent. She said ain't, reckon and them for those, words I was told not to use because they sound country.

Later I realized that my affection for spending time in the woods on my mountain is the other part of where I found what I lost at age 15 when the ground was jerked from under my feet.

And yes, there's not a football in the house.

Back to the Backwoods Beat/Waterfall Road Archive

Email: news@alleghanynews.com